From New Dawn 196 (Jan-Feb 2023)
On the surface, the men who rule the world are central and investment bankers: those who print money and create money from thin air in the form of loans. I say “men” because almost all of them are male. In addition, the men who run the world are law and private enforcement agencies. The central and private bankers cannot survive without the judges, police, and hired goons that enable their system: arrest for non-compliance, fines for failure to pay debts, etc.
The men who run the world are, on the surface, also the founders, CEOs, and majority-shareholders of multibillion-dollar monopolies, including the internet monolith Alphabet, the tech behemoth Apple, the software monopoly Microsoft, the drug giant Pfizer, and BlackRock – the asset manager that owns the bulk of those firms’ shares. The CEOs of these companies meet several times a year at the Bilderberg Group and the World Economic Forum.
Many of these elites operate in the even-smaller circles of secret societies and fraternal orders. In 2011, BlackRock’s co-founder and current CEO, Larry Fink, sat in the United Grand Lodge of England’s Freemasonic Hall and urged the European Union, of which Britain was then a member, to inject $2 trillion worth of central bank money into the global economy to head off recession.1 Fink’s colleagues in Wall Street and the City of London Corporation had crashed the economy in 2007-08 with their reckless gambling. Their intervention led to more than a decade of low-growth, low-wages and enormous top-down profits.
The men who rule the world control thought with their privately-owned media. CNN and other broadcasters are owned by Warner Bros Discovery, which in turn is owned by BlackRock and other asset managers. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post (WashPo), eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar owns The Intercept, and centibillionaire Elon Musk owns Twitter.
With campaign donations and propaganda, these and other rich men own politicians. A record-breaking one billion dollars in lobbying in the US was spent in the first quarter of 2022 alone.2
I say these men run the world “on the surface” because, as we shall see, an enormous secret apparatus operates in the name of national security which seeks to control the direction of these men and their investments.
CENTIBILLIONAIRES
In 2018, Jeff Bezos’s estimated wealth surpassed $100 billion, making him the world’s first centibillionaire for two decades. Bezos made his money, in part, by enjoying US federal government subsidies in the form of tax breaks – literally paying nothing in some years3 – and basing his business on computers and the internet, both of which were developed with public money after WWII. Generally, Amazon is notorious for not paying staff a living wage, hiring corporate spies, busting potential unions, and controlling warehouse staff with CCTV-linked to algorithms that punish transgressions, such as going to the toilet. In 2000, Bezos founded his space venture arm, Blue Origin, which in 2021 won millions of dollars worth of taxpayer money from the Pentagon’s Space Force to develop cryogenic fluid management systems for the New Glenn rocket – a heavy-lift orbit vehicle.
Technically, Microsoft founder and CEO Bill Gates became a centibillionaire briefly in 1999, with the so-called “.com” bubble, before seeing his wealth dip below that figure. All that changed in 2019 when his wealth surpassed $100 billion, where it has remained ever since. Like Bezos, Gates enjoyed handouts from the nanny state in the form of procurement contracts, low taxes, and early dibs on innovations in non-computing fields, like geo- and genetic engineering, and particularly injectable products. Under cover of saving black children from malaria and other diseases, Gates’s Foundation has made a fortune pedalling genetically-modified crops and alleged vaccines, which need to be cooled in order to “work.” The lucrative, patented cooling technology is the most profitable part of the new jab technology, which interests Gates the most.
Like Bezos and the rest of them, government responses to the pandemic led Gates to double his wealth4 as people were locked down and used his Microsoft products. Gates also bet on various “vaccine stocks.”5
The world’s richest man, at the time of writing, is Elon Musk: a person born into wealth6 and who, through his Neuralink company, thinks it’s “cool” to torture primates by snatching them from their mothers, raising them in cages, and forcing them to participate in experiments that include wiring their brains to microchips, which will one day be implanted into humans. Musk’s lithium battery firm, Tesla, relies on minerals acquired from Third World countries. In the style of the more right-wing elements of the US Central Intelligence Agency, Musk tweeted about the US-backed putsch in Bolivia: “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”7 Like Bezos’s Blue Origin, Musk’s SpaceX has enjoyed Pentagon contracts to save it from ruination. Musk recently supplied satellites to Ukraine in its war with Russia. Like Bill Gates buying favourable media coverage of himself and Bezos purchasing WashPo, Musk has taken over Twitter, branding himself as a saviour of the kind of speech that the neoliberal elite has gradually censored over the last few years.
But these men are not free to do as they wish, despite the godlike status they try to portray.
Melinda Gates implied during a TV interview that she left her husband partly because of his association with the child rapist and trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein, who was part of an intelligence agency plot to entrap and blackmail wealthy and influential people. US intelligence has had to deny plausible rumours that it is investigating Musk as a threat to national security because he reinstated former US President Trump’s Twitter account.
SHADOW GOVERNMENT
The men with the most influence over national politics and economics are those who work in the shadows. For instance, the “magic wall” of CNN gives Americans the supposed results of democratic elections. But not only are the candidates of elections bought by lobbyists, the “magic wall” that purports to show election results was the product of the company Perceptive Pixel, a start-up funded by the Central Intelligence Agency’s venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel.8 CNN’s then-head of politics, David Bohrman, first saw the “magic wall” at a military-intelligence event.9 In other words, CNN viewers receive their election data indirectly from the CIA. Bill Gates’s Microsoft acquired Perceptive Pixel in 2012. (In-Q-Tel is named after Q in the James Bond movies. The original Bond novels were written by the British Naval officer, Ian Fleming. Bond’s cypher was 007: the real-life cypher of the occultist and cryptologist, John Dee, a spy for Queen Elizabeth I.)
Unlike CEOs and corporate co-founders who have their own private intelligence units and investigators,10 the military and intelligence apparatus can and does murder and threaten to murder whoever it deems a threat to “national security” – a vague phrase that, in reality, does not mean the security of you or me, but rather, the given elite’s grip on power. The controlled media complex is quick to say that the Russian state murders rival politicians and dissident journalists but claims “accident” or “suicide” when Western states do the same to irksome citizens.
For instance, after the journalist Gary Webb exposed CIA cocaine trafficking in the 1980s, he supposedly killed himself with two bullets to the head. Agencies rely on a gullible culture and media plants to tell the public that any investigation into foul play is crazy conspiracy theorising.
During his stint at the LA Times, Ken Dilanian worked closely with the CIA, asking for their approval for stories and to suggest stories.11 In mid-2021, Dilanian, then at NBC, downplayed the lab-leak theory of SARS-CoV-2.12 It turns out that the US had outsourced dangerous gain-of-function experiments to China via a non-profit called the EcoHealth Alliance [for more on this, see the interview with Prof. Jeffrey Sachs in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 16 No 6].
In part, intelligence agents also rule the world by taking over local investigations. After 9/11, for example, New York police arrested Israelis who were seen appearing to celebrate the attacks. The case was transferred to the FBI, then run by the longest-serving director Robert Mueller, who let them flee to Israel.
Intelligence agencies and their political supporters compel judges to drop certain cases. In 1989, US Attorney General Dick Thornburgh prevented evidence against a former CIA station chief from being heard in a federal court under the Classified Information Procedures Act. This led the judge to dismiss all charges.13 The agencies can do anything they like while protecting their agents from exposure under legislation like the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Even if the higher-ups disagree with a particular operation, they protect the given agency’s reputation by shielding the rogue agents from public scrutiny.
But agents and officers are not all-powerful. They merely exert influence by having a de facto license to kill. The public execution of John F. Kennedy in 1963 was a display of who runs the United States. In those days, it was Freemasonic networks operating in the CIA, FBI, and military intelligence. Freemasonry as an institution did not necessarily condone or have anything to do with the murder, but rather, the agents and individuals involved in the assassination happened to be high-ranking Masons: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Kennedy’s replacement Lyndon B. Johnson, and Abraham Zapruder who captured the killing on camera.
Today, multimillion-dollar companies and the people running them are already powerful, so it does not take much for agents to threaten non-compliant CEOs into doing the bidding of the intelligence agencies. This mafia form of politics makes agents operating in intelligence circles more powerful than CEOs, who become those agents’ puppets. It has been five decades since the Church Committee of the US Congress attempted to launch a serious investigation into agencies’ structures and operations.
Ex-agents hope to become – or have become – politicians: for example, in the US, Matt Castelli (Democrat), Will Hurd (Republican), Elissa Slotkin (Democrat), and Abigail Spanberger (Democrat).
In an interview with the multimillionaire podcaster Joe Rogan, the billionaire Facebook (Meta) co-founder Mark Zuckerberg said that his company’s decision to limit information favourable to US President Donald Trump was due to pressure from the intelligence agencies, which claimed that Trump and his supporters were a threat to US national security – again, meaning to the interests of certain elites. “Liberal” legacy media ignored the story, and the right wing focused upon it as proof of a political agenda against Trump.
Zuckerberg was saying nothing new. In December 2020, weeks before the 6 January events, he had testified to Congress and made the same remarks. Zuckerberg: “In the weeks leading up to the election, the Director of National Intelligence, the Head of the FBI, and the bipartisan leaders of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reminded Americans about the threat posed by foreign influence operations… Along with their public warnings, and as part of the ongoing cooperation that tech companies established with government partners following the 2016 election…”14 Hardly anybody noticed. Twitter co-founder and billionaire Jack Dorsey said virtually the same thing during his Congressional question and answer session.
In addition, Meta has hired ex-CIA and FBI agents to police content. Here is a small sample: CIA contractor Hagan Barnett; US Army Officer Joey Chan; CIA analyst Cameron Harris; Department of Defense project manager Sherif Kamal; DoD Intelligence Officer Suzanna Morrow; FBI threat investigator Ellen Nixon; Marine Corps Intelligence Officer Neil Potts; CIA targeting officer Scott Stern; CIA senior analyst Mike Torrey; FBI supervisory special agent Emily Vacher; and CIA counterintelligence specialist Bryan Weisbard.15
This tells us several things. First, no matter how wealthy and powerful somebody may be, in this case Zuckerberg and Dorsey, they are usually afraid of intelligence agencies and bend to their will, even when doing so is economically harmful to the corporation (in this case downgrading and limiting content). Second, the given President’s power depends on whether or not the media support him (“him,” because at the time of writing, no women have entered this office in the US). Third, major influence can be wrought upon an election by politically-motivated intelligence agencies – in this case, killing a damaging story about the opposition candidate’s son (Hunter Biden). Fourth, their influence over corporations often involves having words with the CEOs. This is usually sufficient to push them in the desired direction.
There is an entire network of corporate-intelligence operatives influencing business and politics.
A few years ago, the business press reported that Deutsche Bank, HSBC, and JPMorgan were hiring former intelligence and military operatives, ostensibly to stop rogue traders. These include employees of Britain’s spy agency, GCHQ (which the NSA allegedly used as a conduit to spy on Trump), and the CIA. Big banks buy politicians with campaign donations and intelligence agencies work for those banks and influence politics.16
BlackRock is the biggest asset manager and institutional investor in the world. Together with State Street, Vanguard, and others like Fidelity, it has a controlling institutional stake in Alphabet (which owns Google and YouTube), Amazon, Facebook (Meta), and America’s other giant corporate monopolies, as well as big pharma, big oil, big real estate, and much more. President Obama selected Tom Donilon as National Security Advisor. Donilon went on to chair the BlackRock Investment Institute. President-elect Biden even considered picking him to head the CIA.17
Biden also filled the Treasury with BlackRockers. “BlackRock is becoming one of Wall Street’s key D.C. conduits,” says the business journal Bloomberg. Biden’s Treasury choice as senior advisor on Russia and Ukraine is Eric Van Nostrand, former BlackRock managing director. Biden already wanted former BlackRock “Sustainability” head, Brian Deese, to head his National Economic Council. Vice President Kamala Harris’s Chief Economic Advisor was another ex-Obama flunky, namely Mike Pyle who before working for Harris was BlackRock’s Chief Investment Strategist.18
• • •
These are the kind of people who meet annually at the World Economic Forum, Bilderberg Group, and other exclusive dining clubs to chat, off the record, about the direction of the world they are trying to impose on the rest of us in the name of democracy and security.
They have already succeeded in undermining real democracy, in injecting billions of people with an experimental product under the guise of countering a global health emergency, and are now using taxpayer money and the cloak of national security to create a new era of biological manipulation to shift from the data economy to the biotech economy.
In addition to the multitude of behind-the-scenes players like intelligence agents, the men who rule the world have some public faces, too, like Bill Gates – the so-called philanthropist buying America’s farmland and openly using “charity” as a way of making more money for himself.
Footnotes
1. www.fnlondon.com/articles/blackrock-larry-fink-financial-news-awards-for-excellence-asset-management-2011-20111013.
2. www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/05/unprecedented-1-billion-first-quarter-lobbying-haul-puts-2022-on-track-for-record-year/.
3. www.cnbc.com/2020/02/04/amazon-had-to-pay-federal-income-taxes-for-the-first-time-since-2016.html
4. www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/ten-richest-men-double-their-fortunes-pandemic-while-incomes-99-percent-humanity.
5. www.fool.com/investing/2020/09/24/4-coronavirus-vaccine-stocks-the-bill-melinda-gate/.
6. sites.imsa.edu/acronym/2021/03/04/elon-musk-is-not-an-entrepreneur-hes-a-rich-deceitful-hack/.
7. twitter.com/panoparker/status/1318157559266762752?lang=en.
8. www.businessinsider.com/25-cutting-edge-companies-funded-by-the-central-intelligence-agency-2012-8?r=US.
9. www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/arts/television/22king.html.
10. truthout.org/articles/corporate-spies-are-watching-organized-labor/.
11. theintercept.com/2014/09/04/former-l-times-reporter-cleared-stories-cia-publication/.
12. www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fauci-s-emails-don-t-prove-wuhan-conspiracy-raise-further-n1269650.
13. www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-11-25-mn-226-story.html.
14. web.archive.org/web/20210329134044/https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Zuckerberg%20Responses%20to%20QFRs.pdf.
15. www.mintpressnews.com/meet-ex-cia-agents-deciding-facebook-content-policy/281307/.
16. www.businessinsider.com/banks-hire-former-spies-to-try-and-prevent-misconduct-2016-2.
17. www.politico.com/news/2020/11/25/biden-leans-toward-donilon-as-cia-chief-440669
18. www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-11/biden-ties-to-blackrock-deepen-with-latest-treasury-hire.
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